Specialised Informtion Service for Research Middle East, North Africa and Islamic Studies

• Applicant: Anke Berghaus-Sprengel
• Term: since 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 284366805

The Specialised Information Service (SIS) Middle East, North Africa and Islamic Studies is both regionally and subject-oriented. From a regional perspective, it ensures that humanities, social, political, literary and linguistic studies on Arabic-speaking North Africa and the Middle East, Turkey and Iran, as well as the Caucasus and Central Asia, are supplied with literature relevant to their research. In respect of academic disciplines it will cover the Islamic and Middle East studies (including Arabic, Iranian, Turkish/Turkic, Caucasian and Armenian studies).In terms of acquisition and licensing, the SIS focuses on providing hard-to-find literature in the original languages of the MENA region. Due to difficult and time-consuming supply routes, timely acquisition of new publications is necessary to avoid future gaps in supply. The SIS intends to take on a reservoir function for such source materials. To an increasing extent, licences are to be negotiated for databases with original language publications that are not yet accessible elsewhere in Germany.The open access repository MENAdoc will be extended through cooperation with publishers and copyrights holders in the MENA region. The SIS will negotiate the digitisation and free accessibility of specialist literature from earlier decades that has so far only been published in print, but which remains relevant for research. The SIS will also offer Islamic and Middle East scholars the possibility of publication in green open access on its repository MENAdoc and will use the DNB service for "Out-of-print works" to digitise German academic literature published before 1966 that is not yet in the public domain. The open source software Tesseract will be trained to recognise further non-Latin writings from the MENA region in full text and make them searchable. In the field of research data management, the SIS intends to develop best-practice examples for handling digitised cultural heritage from the MENA region and in its languages. It will also explore technical ways to define and implement requirements for a repository to make closed-access materials from the MENA region accessible. In cooperation with the Gesellschaft für Turkologie, Osmanistik und Türkeikunde (GTOT), the internationally known bibliography Turkologischer Anzeiger will be transferred and continued as a digital bibliography referenced in international cataloguesIn order to systematically develop the exchange with the scientific community, public relations work will be expanded. The services of the SIS are to be continuously promoted via its own website, surveys, newsletters and social media channels. In addition to roadshows at the institutes of the scientific community, online training in ongoing seminars will be intensified in order to determine their requirements and to be able to communicate existing offers.

• DFG Programme: Acquisition and Provision (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)